When the world-illuming sun rushed upon Night like a brigand,



My weeping bedewed the face of the rose.



My tears washed away sleep from the eye of the narcissus,



My passion wakened the grass and made it grow.



The Gardener taught me to sing with power,



He sowed a verse and reaped a sword.



In the soil he planted only the seed of my tears



And wove my lament with the garden, as warp and woof.



Tho' I am but a mote, the radiant sun is mine:



Within my bosom are a hundred dawns.



Sir Muhammad Iqbal KCSI was a South Asian Muslim writer, philosopher, and politician, whose poetry in the Urdu language is among the greatest of the twentieth century, and whose vision of a cultural and political ideal for the Muslims of British-ruled India was to animate the impulse for Pakistan.